3 Tips from Jonathan Haber on Coursera Time Management!

Editor’s note: Jonathan Haber is a Courserian who is taking classes for 12 months on Coursera to experiment with a project of his called “Degree of Freedom”. He is guest blogging on our site throughout this next year to keep us up-to-date on his progress!

Good morning Coursera-land!

A few weeks back, I ran a series on MOOCs and time over at my Degree of Freedom site that delved into
subjects like how to schedule classes and set priorities in an online learning world where schedules are
so flexible.

Because the flexibility of anywhere, anytime learning comes at a price. For if it’s easy to schedule this
week’s lectures and assignments on any day of the week, it’s just as easy to let them slip into next week.
And do that enough times and pretty soon the workload needed to complete a course becomes so
daunting that it becomes easier just to drop the class.

One of the key reasons I’ve heard that people dropped a MOOC course they had every intention of
completing was that they failed to understand the time commitment these courses required, and/or let
their schedule get away from them.

I put together a brief video that includes suggestions for how to manage time-related issues regarding
MOOCs (or any online learning experience):